Report from the International Recycling & Recovery Congress, September 5-6, 2016 (Vienna, Austria)
September 12, 2016
Dr. Efstratios Kalogirou, GLOBAL WTERT COUNCIL
Dr. Efstratios Kalogirou participated, as invited keynote speaker, in the successful International Recycling & Recovery Congress, held 05th & 06th September 2016 in Vienna, Austria, with a total participation of around 200 worldwide participants from around 40 countries . Also a technical site visit of Spittelau WTE Plant took pace at 7th September.
The Conference was organized by TK VERLAG (Professor Karl Thome-Kozmiensky), with the participation also, among others, of DG Environment of European Commission and CEWEP. It was sponsored by many waste management & waste to energy companies like Martin, EEW, JFE, Steinmuller Babcock Environment, TBF, SICK , LUEHR FILTER, etc.
The aim of the event was to present the current situation of Waste Management Worldwide and to analyze the great potential and planning for developing sustainable waste management and especially WTE in many developing nations around the globe .
The Congress was opened by Jose Jorge Diaz del Castillo from the Unit Waste Management & Recycling of DG Environment of European Commission. During the first day the Strategy and the Country Reports were presented from especially countries like Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Greece, MENA region, India & China. During the second day, very interesting presentations took place on sublects of optimizing the Combustion Process & CFB especially in China , State of the Art APCs, alternative novel WTE Technologies like Pyrolysis, Gasification and finally MBTs and utilization of produced fuels like RDF/SRF.
The main conclusion of the conference was that: Waste to Energy is an Integral Part of Worldwide Sustainable Waste Management in harmonic cooperation with recycling of MSW in the source and composting of pre-selected organic material (without any contradiction) and also that the most dominant and proven technology in the majority of more than 2000 worldwide WTE Plants is the combustion process (mainly in moving grates) with high efficiency energy production . In East Europe the highest development took place in Poland, where there are new 6 PPP Waste to Energy Plants already in operation and a 7th under final construction in Krakow. The current worldwide capacity of today WTE Plants is approximately 250 million tpa, and the estimation from ISWA & UNEP for next decade is to be highly increased to 500%.
